


how am I supposed to hold it?

by sonofahurricane



Series: usually you're dead to get your own museum [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 9/11 reference, Angst, Gen, Museums, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, September 11 Attacks, Smithsonian Institution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 06:39:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4090801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonofahurricane/pseuds/sonofahurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the HYDRA battle in DC, curatorial assistant Cath Denall gets an email from one person she never expected to hear from: Steve Rogers.  <br/>Set immediately after CA:TWS (really towards the very end of the film.) Pseudo-prequel to 'heroes get remembered.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	how am I supposed to hold it?

**Author's Note:**

> Second in my 'usually you're dead to get your own museum' series. I wanted to look at the aftermath of DC, especially on citizens who live there, and then the first few lines popped into my head. It didn't end up doing the idea justice, I don't think, but I tried. It does contain a direct reference to the events of September 11, as I tried to indicate in the tags, though there are no direct flashbacks.

Cath gets an email three hours after power's restored. 31 emails in fact, mostly junk and news updates from things she experienced, things she lived. She deletes without even opening, her apartment sweltering as hot air drifts around it like a dune, until she gets to a subject line that makes her stop. "its steve," from an address she doesn't know, sent seven hours ago, and her stomach drops like the echo of a bomb. 

It’s to her work email. Cath has received dozens of spam emails in her life, probably thousands of emails from political parties and candidates with subject lines claiming to be from a particular candidate or political figure, everyone from the Speaker to the House to the representative from Massachusetts to the President himself. Normally--though not always--someone has bothered to make sure the apostrophe slips in, that the contraction is made clear, because it is still an email generated by a body, not an individual. (Times are changing, though--Cath got an email with an _emoji_ in the subject line during the last midterm election. Part of her is overjoyed, part of her is a little disappointed.) 

There’s no emojis here, though, just those two words “its steve” and she has to wonder for a minute if she’s kidding herself, if she’s dreaming. Her eyes are exhausted and her hands are jittery from too much coffee, and she thinks for a brief second that she should really just throw her phone down and go to _bed_ , because staying awake is doing her no good, but her thumb grazes the touchscreen, and the email pops up, the white background illuminating her face pale against the wall, her eyes glassy behind bent frames. 

“cath,” the email is littered with typos but her name is spelled correctly, and Cath runs a single hand through her hair with a deep sigh, coming to a rest with her hand back at her forehead. She doesn’t need this today. Her eyes dart from the text back up to the time stamp at the beginning of the email, hoping against hope that maybe this was about, she has no clue, exhibit numbers or something equally and beautifully innocuous. But no, if she has the timing right, this was hour seventeen of Cath and co. hunkering down in the basement apartment of a chain smoking art student, fifteen other people crammed close together as her landlady cranked the radio like her life depended on it. They’d moved there after the laundromat windows shook in their frames, basement apartments turning into bunkers. Every hour, like clockwork, someone would mumble something about a terrorist attack on the city, and Mr. Hamilton would remind them solemnly that he’d been five blocks from the Pentagon on _that day_ , and her landlady would hush them fiercely, but that wasn’t enough to stop Cath’s hands from shaking. 

Her hands are still shaking as she scrolls down, almost puts her phone down again because she’s too tired, but she clearly can’t help herself when it comes to Captain America. 

(She wonders, briefly, if anyone has ever said no to him, before dismissing it as a silly thought--of course they’ve said no, he was rejected from the Army so often that really it’s a wonder anyone ever said _yes_. _Yes_ is the miracle word for Steve Rogers, and so here she sits, her thumb scrolling up and down over text she can barely read, saying “yes” to the sweltering darkness.) 

“cath,” she begins reading again, and she wonders if it’s familiarity or brevity that makes him so personal. 

“ca’t ecplain.gosta borrow the suut. Will return adapt. Sorry sr.” 

She rubs her head, wonders why the hell autocorrect completely failed him, and reads it again, then a third time. Sweat rolls down her lower back into the waistband of her underwear, and she thinks vaguely for a moment of how much she must smell. A cold shower would feel good right now, but she’s already shivering, bringing up one hand from her phone to chew on her thumbnail. 

The phone suddenly vibrates in her hand, and she drops it onto her bed in horror, jumps back like it’s a-- a bomb, and she closes her eyes and shakes and shakes and shakes, her hands tangled in her greasy hair. The light on her phone has gone out by the time she lets her heart fall back to a regular pace in her chest, and she wipes her eyes, unsure if she’s crying because she’s so tired, or crying because it’s too much or both or neither. The vibration was a call from the museum, a missed call, now, thanks to her freakout, and she clears her throat as much as she can while she hits redial.

Outside, a taxi honks loudly, and her face already feels sticky against the phone. Cath curses George Washington every year around this time for picking a fucking _swamp_ on which to build the capitol. There were others in the decision, she knows that, but Washington’s the one she’s going to pin the blame on now--the others are just a swirl of names in her head. The air practically hurts to breathe, and she takes a second to think about Tom from down the hall, Tom who gets winded climbing up the steps to their third-floor apartment and explained to her one day that it’s asthma, and finally the line clicks alive and she doesn’t have to combat her buzzing thoughts with the drone of the dial tone. 

“Hello?” The voice is rough on the other end, and she racks her brain to think if she knows which member of the security staff it would be- but there are so many and she’s so tired, she can’t even think straight. 

“Hello, this is Catherine Denall, curatorial assistant,” she says, and she’s almost impressed with herself and how how well she can whip out her Professional Voice even at a time like this. (She should be asleep, she should be asleep, but she has to return the call; she has to be the professional. She thinks for a second how good this would make for a chapter of her dissertation before she cuts herself off, because not every experience is a chapter, not even when it involves Captain America.) 

“Hello, Ms. Denall? Ms. Denall, this is Stanley Kirby, I’m the night guard on shift and uh Ms. Denall, we have a situation here at the museum involving the Captain America exhibit-”

_gosta borrow the suut._

Goddammit Captain Rogers. 

“Uh yes, Mr. Kirby, I know,” she cuts him off--he sounds more than a little panicked, but Cath just doesn’t have it in her to deal with him right now. “Captain Rogers contacted me about the suit, and said he would return it.” He would return it _adapt_ , which she guesses means ASAP, whenever that is supposed to be. She figures the museum probably won’t open tomorrow anyway, if it even survived everything--

Her stomach drops to the floor, and she lets Mr. Kirby’s words flow over her about trying to call the cops but not being able to get an answer, about how nothing else was taken, like he barely heard her. “Thank you for the information Mr. Kirby,” she tries more firmly, but the room is starting to swim with heat, and her eyes are getting heavier by the second. Nothing else was taken, which means the museum is fine, and in the mostly-competent hands of this security guard--who may have been stuck there this entire time. “Are you safe? Do you have a way of getting home? I’m not sure about the situation on the roads right now…” she trails off, realizes that he may have to stay there, and the world feels a little more hopeless, a little more heavy. 

“I’m fine here, miss,” he reports back, and he sound so chipper that she chooses to believe him. Curatorial assistants have literally no power over the raises or promotions of night security guards, but Cath’s going to do her damndest to put in a good word for him anyway. 

“Okay Mr. Kirby. Thank you for the update. Please keep safe, and go home the minute the roads are open again. The rest of the staff should be back in as soon as they are able to assess the damage.” 

Minimal damage, almost nothing really. One exhibit piece gone. Yes, Cath knows there is very little room in the budget for a replacement suit, and that given the massive destruction they heard about over the crackling wind-up radio, there may not be _any_ room in the budget to pay for a replacement, or any funding at _all_ in the near future, but she should be grateful.

Instead, she’s just tired. 

“Yes miss!” Kirby chirps back at her, and Cath hangs up, rubs her thumb over the screen where it has gone sticky from being pressed against her face. Her hair is grimy, but her back and calves ache--from what, she has no idea, because all she did was huddle in a basement apartment all day. No shower right now. In the morning, she will wake up and take a shower and check her email again to see if she has been cleared to head into work, or if the damage is too much. Right now she needs to sleep, needs to put in headphones to block out the noise of the traffic and the choppers that normally don’t mean anything. She needs to sleep, and she drags the blankets off her bed and crawls half-under her top sheet, almost crying again as the fabric drags against her damp skin. She needs to sleep, and she knows it.

So why is she pulling out her phone again, the screen illuminating her face so she can see the slick beads of sweat sliding down into the crook of her forearm? She opens Steve’s email again and reads it, and wonders, then closes it and rolls over in the darkness. 

Then she pulls out her phone again, and reads it, and wonders. News was coming in bits and pieces, more sporadic than the times Cath’s landlady could get the hand crank radio going. She hadn’t bothered to check anything since the all-clear, didn’t want to get sucked into that news cycle of the same repeated things over and over and over again while she sat listlessly, waiting. Could he have-

_He’s Captain America_ , she tells herself, and lets her phone go dark before she stuffs it under her pillow, flopping onto her stomach and trying to focus on the lazy whoosh of the useless ceiling fan above her head. _He’s Captain America.  
Why the hell would he need to borrow the suit?_

She sits up again, throws her pillow to the floor and grabs her phone again, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand while she types in her passcode with the other. Opens her email, reads it again, then sighs and holds her phone in both hands, thumb flying across the keyboard. 

“Captain Rogers,

“Thank you for the notice. I look forward to its return.”

She stops, chews her thumbnail again, reads his email. It’s too formal. Outside, a siren screams past her building, and she can feel her sternum rattling in her chest. What is she supposed to say to him? _I hope it served its purpose? Please don’t be dead? America needs you more than ever?_

She tastes blood, hisses. This is why she stopped chewing her nails in the first place. 

“I hope all is well. Thank you again.” 

Cath sends it before she can regret it, but even the milliseconds between hitting the button and the “sent” message is enough for that voice that says you’re so pathetic to slip in. She throws the phone down to the floor, where it lands on top of her pillow, and she flops against the mattress. Another story to tell her family at Christmas. Another stellar interaction for the record books. 

She needs to sleep. Another chopper zooms across the skies overhead, and she thinks of lullabies from softer times, lets the _chunk thunk chunk_ of the copter blades--or is it her ceiling fan?--rock her gently to sleep.

The sun rises over a broken Washington DC, light piercing through the smoke and dust that are still settling. Cath Denall sleeps on sweaty sheets, paralyzed on her mattress like a zombie. Across the city, Captain Steven Rogers sleeps too, his super-serumed body working overtime to knit together muscle and bone where it had been torn apart. Casualty reports climb with the sun; the president makes another statement no one will believe. A dark figure, baseball cap pulled down over his unkempt hair and shielding his dark eyes, limps across the Mall headed towards the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He squints in the rising sun, and wipes gathering sweat from his face with his good hand. Joggers move past his slouching frame, their feet the only pulse left in the otherwise eerily-silent city. Cath’s alarm clock trills from her phone, and she staggers upright. It’s a new day, and the city--the nation--needs to get back to work.


End file.
